


Glitter in the Dark

by sequence_fairy



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (I refuse to believe she's actually /dead/ so there), (Or well canonical character dissolving into stardust and maybe turning into the universe?), Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Not A Fix-It, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 02:33:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17479559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sequence_fairy/pseuds/sequence_fairy
Summary: After everything, Lance goes out to spread Allura's message to the stars, all the while carrying the loss of her like a yoke around his neck. Her end has left him entirely unmoored, and the path back to land is hard to see through the grief.Later, Coran tells him that Lance keeps Allura’s memory alive just by going on and Lance wants to shake him. He wants to yell about how none of this matters because she’s still gone, she still walked into a cloud of light and turned to stardust and, a year later, took the lions with her too. He wants to scream that he has nothing left of her but the marks that ride high on his cheekbones. The marks that haven’t glowed again since the night the lions left, the marks that Lance wishes he could scrape off his skin like a scab, to see if spilling his own blood would bring her back.





	Glitter in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a tumblr prompt that got entirely out of hand, as they are wont to do, now and again. Had the help of several people on the beta front, including Ember, Renee, and Brit. This would not be the same without your help. <3
> 
> Title from that Bat For Lashes song.

This far out, Lance has trouble with the unending darkness of the void of space in front of him. The distances between star systems stretch into unimaginable numbers, and the vacuum seems like a living thing hell-bent on curling its fingers around the loose edges of his dreams. He wakes up reaching across his bunk for her: his arm flung out into the emptiness beside him, palm up and fingers spread. It always takes him a moment to remember, and the memory always slots in like the hook of a barbed arrow under his ribs.

This cycle is no different. His alarm buzzes softly, lifting him out of a dream coloured with the glow of Allura’s magic, and Lance pulls his arm back in close to his body before he rolls over. He stares, sightless, at the wall across from him for a long moment, willing the grief back into the box he keeps it buried in. It’s hard work. Lance grits his teeth against the memories that slip out of his metaphorical hands to land at his feet; her face, lit with pleasure and surprise, the curve of her hips under his hands, the echo of her voice.

Her voice.

Lance curls around himself, pressing his hands to the centre of his chest. His jaw tightens against the sob that threatens to escape him as a wave of grief swamps him. Has he forgotten the exact cadence of her voice? How could he have forgotten? How can he say he truly loves (loved) her if he can’t remember her perfectly?

What else has he forgotten?

Later, Coran tells him that Lance keeps Allura’s memory alive just by going on and Lance wants to shake him. He wants to yell about how none of this matters because she’s still gone, she still walked into a cloud of light and turned to stardust and, a year later, took the lions with her too. He wants to scream that he has nothing left of her but the marks that ride high on his cheekbones. The marks that haven’t glowed again since the night the lions left, the marks that Lance wishes he could scrape off his skin like a scab, to see if spilling his own blood would bring her back.

(He says nothing and reaches up instead, to drop his hand on Coran’s shoulder, shuffling closer so they’re pressed hip to hip, united in their shared grief, staring out across the starfield as they come into sight of the nebula that signals the halfway point of their journey.)

Coran leaves him alone in the observation lounge, and Lance watches the far away stars slip by as the ship makes the long, slow acceleration into hyperspace. He turns away just before they slide fully into the slipstream, following belatedly in Coran’s wake.

His quarters are cold and dark and empty. Lance climbs into bed, rolls onto his side, and closes his eyes. Sleep never comes easy, but Lance sinks into a doze by silently counting primes until he forgets what comes after the fortieth.

_Lance_.

_Lance?_

_Lance!_

Lance’s eyes fly open and he shoots up to sitting. “A-Allura?” Warmth tingles across his cheekbones, and Lance brings his hands up to his face. The marks are warm, and their soft light illuminates the lines of his palms. The light dies while he’s watching, and with it goes the soft presence at the edges of his perception.

Lance splays back onto his sheets and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. His heart thuds against his ribs.  A dream. It had to be. He sucks in a deep breath, and lets his hands fall to the pillow beside his head. Above him, the featureless ceiling has no answers to the questions Lance refuses to voice. Sleep eludes him for the rest of the night, no matter how hard he tries to recapture the soft haze of his earlier doze.

The first day of the summit they have travelled to attend goes off without a hitch. Lance gives a stirring speech at the site of a battle he didn’t fight in, the crowd cheers when Coran unveils the statue, and no one notices the tears that burn in the back of Lance’s throat as he stares up into that face that is at once achingly familiar and nauseatingly dissimilar to how she looked in life.

He’s made to be the guest of honour at a lavish banquet. While he swirls the local wine in his glass, Lance remembers a time when he would have loved this; when he would have soaked up the admiration and spent the night gossiping into whoever’s ear he could turn about who he might take to bed, who he might stumble home with, who might be on the receiving end of his particular charms. The only bed he was ever headed for was Allura’s, and everyone who looked at them together for longer than twelve ticks knew it.

He begs off of the celebration rather earlier than he ever used to, and wanders back to their assigned rooms in this sprawling fortress-castle. The floor beneath his feet wavers, and Lance stumbles into the wall, barely getting his hands out in time to keep himself from kissing hard stone. How much of that wine had he drunk at dinner? Not that much, surely. Lance shakes his head and keeps going, watching his footing carefully.

Time skips forward like disjointed movie scenes, and the next thing Lance knows, he’s lying on his back, staring up at another featureless ceiling. The bed beneath him is firm, the blankets soft. The party is a distant hum of cheerful noise and Lance lets himself sink into the warmth of this borrowed bed.

Lance slides into sleep easier than he has in months.

Awareness arrives on the heels of the brush of hair over against his chest. Lance opens his eyes. The breath in his body leaves him in a staggered gasp. “Allura? How–?”

Allura lifts a finger to his lips, and Lance shudders under the contact, but wills himself silent. Her mouth curves into a smile, slow blooming and gorgeous. Lance aches for her already, his heart crying out to her from between his ribs, everything in him turning towards her as if he was a flower, petals seeking the sunlight. She shifts, slinging a bare leg over his body, knees pressed tight to his unclothed sides. Her hair falls around her shoulders in thick waves and springy curls, a waterfall of white that hides the dusk of her skin from his view.

She leans down, and Lance’s hands finally get the messages his brain has been trying to send them. He manages to reach up to touch her as she sinks towards him. Her hair falls like a curtain around them, and Lance skates his hands up Allura’s spine. She pauses a hair's breadth away from a kiss, and Lance barely stops the groan in his throat behind his teeth.

She blinks, her eyes glinting like a cat’s in the dark, the curious blue-green of them still exactly the same as they were. “Lance,” she husks, voice gone to smoke in the tiny space between them.

Lance twines the fingers of one hand in her hair while the other slides around to hold the side of her face, thumb smoothing along the mark on her cheek. Allura leans into his touch, eyes falling shut as she does. Her lashes are a fan of snow against her skin. “How are you here?” Lance wonders, softly reverent. Allura doesn’t answer, just closes the distance between them.

Lance surrenders to the pressure of her mouth, fists his hand in her hair and lets Allura lead. The kiss deepens when Allura takes his bottom lip into her mouth, worrying at it with dainty fangs, and Lance groans. Allura’s hands plant firmy beside Lance’s head, and the weight of her body sinks into his. Lance arches against her, the places where his body ached to feel her against him, one last time, soothed by the press of her skin.

Allura’s mouth is a hot slide against his, and Lance’s hands in her hair feel like the only things to keep him from flying apart into scattered stardust. Her knees press into his hips, and the searing heat of her naked centre brands him as she rolls her hips and slides along him, wet and glorious. He’s hard to straining already, hips jumping of their own volition as she drags herself along his length.

“Allura,” Lance croaks, when she pulls away from his lips to mouth along the edge of his jaw and then down the side of his neck, fangs catching gently in his skin. “‘Lura, please.”

Allura makes a soft sound before lifting herself off him enough that he can see her. Her breasts brush his chest. Lance lets one hand drop to find the soft swell of skin. He marvels at the way her skin goes to gooseflesh under the trail of his seeking fingertips. Her breath goes out of her in a ragged gasp as she shifts, lifting herself a little further to allow him access.

Lance lets go of her hair and uses both hands. He lets the edge of his nail drag across one of her nipples and watches with smug satisfaction as the skin around it tightens and the nipple rises, hard, against the sweep of his palm. Allura watches him, all the while, otherworldly eyes trained on the way his mouth falls open in soft awe as she arches her spine and presses the weight of her chest into his hands.

Lance squeezes gently, and Allura bites her lip. She rolls her hips in a dirty grind against him, and Lance shudders, tilting his own hips up to make Allura shudder in turn. She rises off him, and Lance aches for the heat of her against him again. Now that he’s had it, even in this place of misty shadows, he knows he’s ruined for anyone else. She is entropy made flame, and everything in him tends towards her.

“Will you let me have this, too?” Allura asks, voice like the toll of a low bell rolling across sacred plains and through vaunted hallways. Her hand presses flat against his stomach, and Lance can feel the prick of her nails, each like a singular point of flame.

“Everything,” Lance says, breathless, desperate, unashamed of the way his desire for her seeps through every syllable. “Everything. Always.”

Allura’s smile is a slow burn across her face. The curve of her mouth heats Lance’s blood all the way to the ends of his toes. He lets his hands slide off her hips and down to the sheets beside him as she rises further. Her hand wraps around him and Lance hisses, unable to stave off the way her touch makes him shiver.

Allura sinks down onto him in a long, slow slide, and Lance can’t keep his eyes open. He tries, because he wants to watch the way her mouth drops open into a silent ‘o’, wants to watch the fine tremor under hekin as she eases her way down, determined to make this first touch last as long as she can. She bottoms out and Lance gasps, hands scrabbling at the sheets beneath him. Fully sheathed within her, he feels like he’s being encased within the heart of a star.  

The moment hangs between them, Lance’s harsh breathing loud in the sudden silence. Delicious tension coils in the pit of Lance’s belly. Allura’s eyes flutter shut, and she rolls her hips experimentally.

“Fuck,” Lance says, emphatically. Allura looks down at him, eyes hooded and their colour tipped from soft seas to the depths of the winter ocean. The corner of her mouth lifts, and she moves again. “Just like that, Princess,” Lance manages, voice strained by the slow roll of Allura’s hips against him and the press of her palm against the flat of his chest.

“You feel – _ah_ – so good,” Allura says, voice cresting with the sinuous movement of her body, as Lance meets her the best that he can. Allura’s head drops back, exposing the long line of her throat, as the rhythm of her hips accelerates. A thick lock of her hair spills like moonlight between her breasts.

“God,” Lance murmurs, voice cracking, “you’re gorgeous.” He shifts beneath her, and the change in angle makes her hiss. “Yeah,” he says, lifting his hands to grip her hips. Allura brings her hands to her own hair, lifting it up and back, arching her spine as she does. Lance cants his hips to meet her; they moan in tandem.

Allura rides him, confident and graceful and fierce and glorious. Lance holds on, determined not to let the ever-tightening coil at the base of his spine spring open until she falls apart above him. Every time Allura moves, each downstroke ends in a sighing moan that then hitches every time she begins to rise again. It’s a beat beneath Lance’s babble of praise and desperation; her name, over and over and over.

“‘Lura,” he moans, when she rises nearly entirely off him, and holds, both of them straining. She looks down at him, eyes blazing and then envelops him again in a swift descent that punches the air out of his lungs and makes his spine arch off the bed. A shocked sound breaks Allura’s rhythm, and she falls forward, catching herself on both hands planted next to Lance’s head.

Like this, Lance has more reach and slides his hands around to grip her ass, while he cants his hips and changes the rhythm, driving up into her as she rolls back on him. She drops forward again, down to her elbows, and her voice is hot in Lance’s ear. She goads him on, and Lance obliges, until they are both breathing hard and the sound of slick skin meeting skin is loud between them.

The end is coming, Lance knows, in the way his toes curl, the way his thighs shake, the way the molten heat at the base of his spine has started to ignite. “Allura, I’m–” She cuts him off with a bruising kiss. Her hair spills around them in a curtain of softly glowing white.

She shivers, whole body, and sighs into the kiss, trembling apart in his arms. She breathes his name into his mouth. The clench of her insides around him makes Lance toss his head back and he comes on a broken cry, Allura’s mouth moving to press to his neck. Lance holds her down, hands on her hips, her body still moving as she rides him through it.  

Above them, Lance realises, once Allura slides off and curls up next to him, the stars spill across an inky sky. He looks around, lifting himself onto one elbow. The bed is raised, strewn with pillows and sheets he hadn’t noticed, but there’s nothing else in this place but mist and the sky. The mist shifts and moves in visible currents, but without any sensation of wind. Allura smooths her hand along the length of his torso, fingers sliding past the centre of his chest and then down, circling his belly button before sweeping back up, so she can turn his face with the pressure of her fingers along his jaw.

“Where are we?” Lance asks. Allura shakes her head, slow and gentle. She looks down, not meeting his gaze. “Are you even real?” Lance shifts so he can prop himself up on his other arm, and reaches out to sweep Allura’s hair back behind her ear. She looks up at him, lips parted, eyes limpid and soft.

“I’m as real as you need me to be,” she says. “You feel me.” She presses herself along the length of his body and then leans up to kiss him. Her mouth moves gently against his. She pulls away after a long moment, biting his lower lip gently as she does. “What’s more real than this?”

“I love you,” Lance says, and watches as Allura’s cheeks flush. “I love you so much. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of you. Not a moment passes that I don’t wish you were here with me.” He pauses, bringing their faces close enough together that he can press his forehead against hers. He swallows against the lump in his throat, against the tears rising in his eyes. “I wish you were here for real. I wish this was real, and not a dream, not a vision sent from who knows where.” Lance meets her gaze steadily, “I don’t know if I can survive losing you again.”

“Lance,” Allura chides, palm sliding up to cup his cheek, fingertips brushing the mark beneath his eye. Her skin is warm against his.

Lance turns his head so he can press a kiss to the edge of her palm. “I’ve missed you,” he says, into her skin, “so much.” His voice gives away the pain of knowing that he will wake up and she will still be gone.

“I know,” Allura says. She blinks, and Lance slides his hand up to hold Allura’s against his face. “I know,” she repeats, leaning in and kissing the corner of his mouth. “I know.” Lance aches in the soft space under his ribs. She’s going to go away again, going to disappear, and he will wake up, alone, again.

“I don’t want you to go,” Lance says, voice rough.

“I never left,” Allura says. Her gaze is steady. Lance looks away first, unable to bear the softness in her eyes. She takes her hand off his cheek, and presses it to the middle of his chest, palm down. The current of Allura’s magic buzzes against his skin. Warmth blooms under his ribs, soothing the ache that has been yawning there since she disappeared into light to save every reality.

Lance watches her. He memorizes the lines of her face; the set of her jaw, the proud line of her nose, the way her marks glow faintly pink, the sweep of lashes against her cheeks.

Pushing himself up on his elbow, Lance reaches for her. His hand lands on her shoulder. Her skin is warm; the bones beneath feel like the wings of the small songbirds he used to catch when he was a child. Strength takes many forms, he knows, and the fragile femininity in Allura’s stature belies the iron will that covers every inch of her spine. He can feel the race of her rabbit-quick heartbeat.

She’s real here, flesh and blood and bone and heat.

“Stay,” he says, “please.”

“I’m always here,” she says, and leans in. Lance meets her halfway. He feels the rush of her magic in the flood of heat in his blood.

“I love you,” he says, pulling back just far enough to form the words against Allura’s lips. Her smile curving against his mouth is answer enough.

Lance opens his eyes to the grey dawn light in his borrowed bedroom. His cheeks tingle with the leftovers of Allura’s magic. The marks are glowing, he knows. He lays on his back, one hand pressed to the centre of his own chest, feeling the steady beat of his own heart. There, in the silence between the beats, that infinitesimal and eternal moment, is where Allura lives now.

The weight of his grief settles more easily on his shoulders as Lance gets out of bed. It no longer threatens to pull him off balance and send him sprawling onto the floor, crushed and broken beneath it. For a moment, he misses it. The all-consuming nature of it was almost something of a comfort in the wake of his loss.

Learning to walk without it is like learning to walk without the hands of your parents holding you up, or your first time back in full Earth gravity after years of fractions of it in the spaces between the stars. Lance wobbles at first, unsteady, but as he moves through the rest of the summit, shadowing Coran through the negotiations, his steps grow more and more certain.

The week of talks and state dinners and photo ops comes to a close with another party. This time, when Lance falls into bed, as one of this planet’s three suns is rising in the south, it’s with a hand pressed to his chest, to feel the warmth of Allura’s love blooming in the spaces between his heartbeats.

Lance and Coran leave the next day, summit successful and another planet joining the fold of the galactic coalition.

Breaking the atmosphere in their little shuttlecraft, Lance hauls on the yoke, watching the altitude meter climb. Behind him and to his right, Coran is updating the Altean cruiser in high orbit and requesting docking access.

“I had forgotten,” Lance says, turning to look at Coran.

“What did you forget?” Coran asks, “Do we need to go back to the surface?”

“Oh. No,” Lance says as they reach the edge of the atmosphere and space opens, dark and cold, in front of his viewscreen. The first view of true space with the planet falling away behind them is something he will never get over. He pulls on the control arm, sending them into a stomach-churning roll, planet and stars blurring in his line of sight.

“Lance,” Coran says in bemused warning, when Lance straightens them out again, and puts them back on a sedate path to the Altean cruiser.

Lance turns his eyes back to the nav screen, watching the shuttle’s computer plot a docking vector and confirming it with the press of his thumb against the holoscreen. He can see Coran doesn’t understand, but Lance isn’t sure he does either, just that now, staring out at the star-studded emptiness in front of them, the Altean cruiser looming just at the top of his viewscreen, space no longer feels like a void.

**Author's Note:**

> Please come and chat with me about my fic on [tumblr](http://sequencefairy.tumblr.com) or on [twitter](https://twitter.com/warpspeed_chic).


End file.
